Colin Grant: The son of a difficult father

100,057 views ・ 2014-09-05

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00:12
This is a photograph
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of a man whom for many years
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I plotted to kill.
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This is my father,
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Clinton George "Bageye" Grant.
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He's called Bageye because he has
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permanent bags under his eyes.
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As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings,
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I dreamt of scraping off the poison
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from fly-killer paper into his coffee,
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grounded down glass and sprinkling it
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over his breakfast,
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loosening the carpet on the stairs
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so he would trip and break his neck.
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But come the day, he would always
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skip that loose step,
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he would always bow out of the house
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without so much as a swig of coffee
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or a bite to eat.
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And so for many years,
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I feared that my father would die
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before I had a chance to kill him.
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(Laughter)
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Up until our mother asked him to leave
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and not come back,
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Bageye had been a terrifying ogre.
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He teetered permanently on the verge of rage,
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rather like me, as you see.
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He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton
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and demanded total silence throughout the house,
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so that when we came home from school
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at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle
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beside the TV, and rather like safe-crackers,
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we would twiddle with the volume control knob
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on the TV so it was almost inaudible.
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And at times, when we were like this,
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so much "Shhh," so much "Shhh"
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going on in the house
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that I imagined us to be like
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the German crew of a U-boat
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creeping along the edge of the ocean
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whilst up above, on the surface,
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HMS Bageye patrolled
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ready to drop death charges
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at the first sound of any disturbance.
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So that lesson was the lesson that
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"Do not draw attention to yourself
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either in the home or outside of the home."
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Maybe it's a migrant lesson.
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We were to be below the radar,
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so there was no communication, really,
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between Bageye and us and us and Bageye,
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and the sound that we most looked forward to,
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you know when you're a child and you want
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your father to come home and it's all going to be happy
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and you're waiting for that sound of the door opening.
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Well the sound that we looked forward to
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was the click of the door closing,
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which meant he'd gone and would not come back.
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So for three decades,
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I never laid eyes on my father, nor he on me.
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We never spoke to each other for three decades,
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and then a couple of years ago, I decided
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to turn the spotlight on him.
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"You are being watched.
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Actually, you are.
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You are being watched."
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That was his mantra to us, his children.
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Time and time again he would say this to us.
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And this was the 1970s, it was Luton,
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where he worked at Vauxhall Motors,
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and he was a Jamaican.
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And what he meant was,
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you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant
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are being watched
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to see which way you turn, to see whether
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you conform to the host nation's stereotype of you,
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of being feckless, work-shy,
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destined for a life of crime.
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You are being watched,
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so confound their expectations of you.
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To that end, Bageye and his friends,
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mostly Jamaican,
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exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura:
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Turn your best side to the world,
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show your best face to the world.
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If you have seen some of the images
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of the Caribbean people arriving
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in the '40s and '50s,
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you might have noticed that a lot of the men
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wear trilbies.
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Now, there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica.
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They invented that tradition for their arrival here.
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They wanted to project themselves in a way
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that they wanted to be perceived,
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so that the way they looked
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and the names that they gave themselves
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defined them.
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So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes.
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Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear.
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Anxious is always anxious.
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Clock has one arm longer than the other.
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(Laughter)
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And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear.
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When Summerwear came to this country
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from Jamaica in the early '60s, he insisted
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on wearing light summer suits,
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no matter the weather,
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and in the course of researching their lives,
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I asked my mom, "Whatever became of Summerwear?"
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And she said, "He caught a cold and died." (Laughter)
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But men like Summerwear
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taught us the importance of style.
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Maybe they exaggerated their style
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because they thought that they were not considered
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to be quite civilized,
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and they transferred that generational attitude
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or anxiety onto us, the next generation,
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so much so that when I was growing up,
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if ever on the television news or radio
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a report came up about a black person
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committing some crime —
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a mugging, a murder, a burglary —
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we winced along with our parents,
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because they were letting the side down.
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You did not just represent yourself.
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You represented the group,
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and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with,
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in a way, that maybe you were going
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to be perceived in the same light.
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So that was what needed to be challenged.
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Our father and many of his colleagues
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exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving.
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They were built to transmit but not receive.
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We were to keep quiet.
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When our father did speak to us,
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it was from the pulpit of his mind.
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They clung to certainty in the belief
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that doubt would undermine them.
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But when I am working in my house
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and writing, after a day's writing, I rush downstairs
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and I'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley
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and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies
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and I'm so excited that my children stop me,
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and they say, "Dad, nobody cares."
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(Laughter)
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But they do care, actually.
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They cross over.
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Somehow they find their way to you.
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They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life,
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as I did with my father and my mother, perhaps,
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and maybe Bageye did with his father.
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And that was clearer to me
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in the course of looking at his life
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and understanding, as they say,
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the Native Americans say,
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"Do not criticize the man until you can walk
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in his moccasins."
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But in conjuring his life, it was okay
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and very straightforward to portray
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a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s
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with bowls of plastic fruit,
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polystyrene ceiling tiles,
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settees permanently sheathed
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in their transparent covers that they were delivered in.
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But what's more difficult to navigate
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is the emotional landscape
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between the generations,
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and the old adage that with age comes wisdom
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is not true.
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With age comes the veneer of respectability
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and a veneer of uncomfortable truths.
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But what was true was that my parents,
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my mother, and my father went along with it,
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did not trust the state to educate me.
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So listen to how I sound.
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They determined that they would send me to a private school,
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but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors.
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It's quite difficult to fund a private school education
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and feed his army of children.
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I remember going on to the school
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for the entrance exam, and my father said
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to the priest — it was a Catholic school —
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he wanted a better "heducation" for the boy,
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but also, he, my father,
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never even managed to pass worms,
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never mind entrance exams.
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But in order to fund my education,
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he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff,
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so my father would fund my education
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by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car,
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and that was made even more tricky because
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my father, that's not his car by the way.
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My father aspired to have a car like that,
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but my father had a beaten-up Mini,
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and he never, being a Jamaican coming to this country,
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he never had a driving license,
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he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT.
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He thought, "I know how to drive;
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why do I need the state's validation?"
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But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police,
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and we were stopped a lot by the police,
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and I was impressed by the way
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that my father dealt with the police.
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He would promote the policeman immediately,
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so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs
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in the course of the conversation
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and wave us on merrily.
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So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica
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called "playing fool to catch wise."
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But it lent also an idea
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that actually he was being diminished
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or belittled by the policeman —
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as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that —
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but also there was an ambivalence towards authority.
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So on the one hand, there was
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a mocking of authority,
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but on the other hand, there was a deference
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towards authority,
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and these Caribbean people
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had an overbearing obedience towards authority,
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which is very striking, very strange in a way,
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because migrants are very courageous people.
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They leave their homes. My father and my mother
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left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles,
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and yet they were infantilized by travel.
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They were timid,
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and somewhere along the line,
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the natural order was reversed.
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The children became the parents to the parent.
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The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan:
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they would work, some money, and then go back,
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but the five years became 10, the 10 became 15,
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and before you know it, you're changing the wallpaper,
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and at that point, you know you're here to stay.
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Although there's still the kind of temporariness
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that our parents felt about being here,
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but we children knew that the game was up.
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I think there was a feeling that
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they would not be able to continue with the ideals
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of the life that they expected.
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The reality was very much different.
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And also, that was true of the reality
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of trying to educate me.
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Having started the process, my father did not continue.
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It was left to my mother to educate me,
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and as George Lamming would say,
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it was my mother who fathered me.
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Even in his absence, that old mantra remained:
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You are being watched.
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But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety,
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so much so that years later, when I was investigating
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why so many young black men
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were diagnosed with schizophrenia,
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six times more than they ought to be,
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I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say,
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"Black people are schooled in paranoia."
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And I wonder what Bageye would make of that.
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Now I also had a 10-year-old son,
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and turned my attention to Bageye
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and I went in search of him.
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He was back in Luton, he was now 82,
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and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years,
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and when he opened the door,
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I saw this tiny little man with lambent, smiling eyes,
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and he was smiling, and I'd never seen him smile.
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I was very disconcerted by that.
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But we sat down, and he had a Caribbean friend with him,
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talking some old time talk,
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and my father would look at me,
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and he looked at me as if I would
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miraculously disappear as I had arisen.
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And he turned to his friend, and he said,
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"This boy and me have a deep, deep connection,
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deep, deep connection."
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But I never felt that connection.
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If there was a pulse, it was very weak
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or hardly at all.
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And I almost felt in the course of that reunion
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that I was auditioning to be my father's son.
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When the book came out,
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it had fair reviews in the national papers,
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but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian,
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it's the Luton News,
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and the Luton News ran the headline about the book,
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"The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift."
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And I understood that could also represent
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the rift between one generation and the next,
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between people like me and my father's generation,
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but there's no tradition in Caribbean life
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of memoirs or biographies.
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It was a tradition that you didn't chat about your business in public.
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But I welcomed that title, and I thought actually, yes,
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there is a possibility that this
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will open up conversations that we'd never had before.
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This will close the generation gap, perhaps.
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This could be an instrument of repair.
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And I even began to feel that this book
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may be perceived by my father
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as an act of filial devotion.
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Poor, deluded fool.
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Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be
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the public airing of his shortcomings.
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He was stung by my betrayal,
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and he went to the newspapers the next day
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and demanded a right of reply,
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and he got it with the headline
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"Bageye Bites Back."
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14:09
And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal.
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14:12
I was no son of his.
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14:15
He recognized in his mind that his colors
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14:17
had been dragged through the mud, and he couldn't allow that.
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14:20
He had to restore his dignity, and he did so,
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14:22
and initially, although I was disappointed,
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I grew to admire that stance.
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There was still fire bubbling through his veins,
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even though he was 82 years old.
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14:33
And if it meant that we would now return
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14:36
to 30 years of silence,
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14:39
my father would say, "If it's so, then it's so."
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14:45
Jamaicans will tell you that there's no such thing as facts,
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14:48
there are only versions.
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14:50
We all tell ourselves the versions of the story
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14:53
that we can best live with.
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14:56
Each generation builds up an edifice
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14:58
which they are reluctant or sometimes unable
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15:00
to disassemble,
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15:03
but in the writing, my version of the story
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15:06
began to change,
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15:08
and it was detached from me.
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15:12
I lost my hatred of my father.
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15:15
I did no longer want him to die or to murder him,
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15:20
and I felt free,
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15:24
much freer than I'd ever felt before.
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15:29
And I wonder whether that freedness
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15:31
could be transferred to him.
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15:36
In that initial reunion,
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15:40
I was struck by an idea that I had
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15:42
very few photographs of myself
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15:46
as a young child.
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15:48
This is a photograph of me,
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15:50
nine months old.
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15:53
In the original photograph,
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15:55
I'm being held up by my father, Bageye,
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15:58
but when my parents separated, my mother
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16:00
excised him from all aspects of our lives.
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16:03
She took a pair of scissors and cut him out of every photograph,
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16:07
and for years, I told myself the truth of this photograph
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16:10
was that you are alone,
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16:13
you are unsupported.
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16:16
But there's another way of looking at this photograph.
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16:18
This is a photograph that has the potential
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16:21
for a reunion,
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16:23
a potential to be reunited with my father,
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16:26
and in my yearning to be held up by my father,
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16:30
I held him up to the light.
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16:33
In that first reunion,
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16:36
it was very awkward and tense moments,
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16:38
and to lessen the tension,
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16:39
we decided to go for a walk.
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16:43
And as we walked, I was struck
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16:45
that I had reverted to being the child
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16:47
even though I was now towering above my father.
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16:50
I was almost a foot taller than my father.
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16:53
He was still the big man,
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16:55
and I tried to match his step.
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17:00
And I realized that he was walking
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17:02
as if he was still under observation,
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17:04
but I admired his walk.
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17:07
He walked like a man
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17:10
on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final
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17:13
mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal.
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17:16
There was dignity in defeat.
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17:20
Thank you.
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17:22
(Applause)
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878
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